Smooth Sailing in a Sea of Evolution

Smooth Jazz Finds New Ways to Reach Its Audience

The scene at a Smooth Cruise on the Hudson.Credit
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

The Spirit of New York was making good time down the Hudson on a recent evening, approaching the southern tip of Manhattan, when the members of BWB emerged from below deck to a full-throated cheer. It was the first installment of the current Smooth Cruise season, and the applause kept going as BWB — a collaboration of the guitarist Norman Brown, the saxophonist Kirk Whalum and the trumpeter Rick Braun — played a snippet of “Milestones,” by Miles Davis, and then swerved into Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.”

Looking over the neatly dressed, enthusiastic and racially diverse crowd, a casual observer could reasonably have concluded that times are still flush for smooth jazz. But from an informed position, the scene was yet more proof of the music’s entrenchment in post-shock survival mode. Since the great radio purges of 2008 and 2009, when stations across the country abandoned the format, smooth jazz has been not just maligned but also marginalized — stripped of its main distribution channel just as the record business was falling to pieces. The only recourse for its musicians and fans has been to adapt, regrouping now as a subculture, often literally at sea.

Perhaps less expectedly, those practical adjustments have begun to yield aesthetic developments, as seen in a spate of recent albums, notably “Human Nature” (Heads Up International), by BWB; “The Beat” (Concord), by the saxophonist Boney James; and especially “Summer Horns” (Concord), featuring Dave Koz and three fellow saxophonists, each known as a solo artist.

These albums, which all have tracks on Billboard’s Smooth Jazz Songs chart, make an emphatic point of collaboration, potentially appealing to multiple fan bases. They all exploit some form of nostalgia, expertly reformulated for contemporary palates. And they all feature musicianship by real-life studio aces, creating a tight but organic sound that feels easily transferable to live performance. If you were a smooth-jazz veteran looking to cover your bases at an uncertain time, you’d be making albums like these: meticulous but breezy, openhearted but not sentimental, smart but not too smart. It’s as if everyone involved had cracked some kind of code.

Twenty years ago, of course, smooth jazz wasn’t a code to be cracked so much as a wave to be caught. Like most species of pop, it felt ubiquitous and maybe a little insidious, asking nothing more (or less) of you than surrender. During the summer of 1993, Kenny G had a Top 40 single, his second such hit from the inescapable album “Breathless.” Smooth jazz had an enviable infrastructure then; even a small American city was likely to have a dedicated radio station.

What it didn’t have was cachet, critical regard or any trace of cool. (Kenny G has recently taken pains to show that he’s in on the joke.) This was a music forged by market considerations, less a coherent genre than a commercial format. Its native habitats were the office cubicle, the minivan and the five-day forecast. “The Weather Channel Presents: The Best of Smooth Jazz” was a compilation album that actually saw release, in 2007; it was so successful that a sequel appeared the following year. Which was just when the ground began to buckle.

Photo

The first installment of the Smooth Cruise on the Hudson season featured BWB, from left, Rick Braun, Kirk Whalum and Norman Brown.Credit
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

“Radio went away because some corporate knucklehead said, ‘O.K., this isn’t working, because we need to make more money,’ ” Mr. Braun said on the Spirit of New York before BWB’s set, expressing a point of view widely shared among his fellow artists. “And they changed it, and now they’re making less money. But we’re lucky because our audience is basically an older, affluent audience. And the audience is still there.”

True enough, but you’d have to know where to look. The Smooth Jazz Cruise — not the Lower Manhattan sunset jaunt but a weeklong experience on the Holland America Line — has been profitable since its maiden voyage not quite a decade ago. (The 2014 edition has been sold out for months.) “When we first started the cruise,” said Michael Lazaroff, the executive director of Entertainment Cruise Productions, “radio and print were the infrastructure on which we relied.”

“Whereas now,” he said, “you could suggest that our cruise is one of the pillars of the infrastructure.”

Mr. Koz has a cruise of his own, which was founded by Mr. Lazaroff, and now competes for a similar talent pool and target demographic. There are also some land-based institutions, like the Thornton Winery Champagne Jazz Series, in Temecula, Calif., which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.

Still, a thriving niche market isn’t quite the same thing as a robustly healthy ecosystem. In its opening week, “Human Nature,” the BWB album, sold all of 3,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. This was enough for a No. 4 spot on Billboard’s Jazz Albums chart, directly behind Mr. Koz. But unlike jazz proper, which has long been grimly accustomed to paltry figures, smooth jazz has no reassuring claim to cultural value. It’s no wonder some of its pioneers and progenitors have distanced themselves from the style.

George Benson, the guitarist and singer whose 1976 album “Breezin’ ” bears about the same relationship to smooth jazz that the Stooges’ “Raw Power” does to punk, has a new album dedicated to Nat King Cole: the ultimate symbol, among a choice demographic, of crisp decorum and elevated taste. The trumpeter Chris Botti won the most recent Grammy for best pop instrumental album by waxing calm and tasteful over shimmery backgrounds; though he came from smooth jazz, he now belongs to the world of David Foster and Andrea Bocelli, two of his album’s guests.

The Yellowjackets, a smooth-compatible fusion band, just released “A Rise in the Road” (Mack Avenue), an album that often runs looser and tougher than usual. (Its featured guest is the critically acclaimed trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire.) Then there’s “Quartette Humaine” (OKeh), by the alto saxophonist David Sanborn and the pianist Bob James. Though it’s their first collaboration since the 1986 album “Double Vision,” a foundational text of smooth jazz, it’s an acoustic post-bop album inspired by the legacy of Dave Brubeck, who died one week before it was recorded.

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A night on the Hudson with BWB, which recently released “Human Nature.”Credit
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

“Take Five,” the defining Desmond-Brubeck tune, doesn’t appear on “Quartette Humaine.” But it does surface on “Summer Horns,” Mr. Koz’s new album, where its treatment is instructive. As on the rest of the album, it features harmonized parts for four saxophonists: Mr. Koz, Mindi Abair, Gerald Albright and Richard Elliot. Unlike the rest of the album, it has no drums or guitar or keyboards. (The arrangement, by Gordon Goodwin, augments those saxophones with just a bass line.) Somehow the sparseness helps make this gesture seem timely and respectful rather than crass.

But on the whole, “Summer Horns” basks happily in opportunism. Its track list includes some of the bigger hits by boomer-catnip bands with horn sections: Earth, Wind & Fire, Chicago, Tower of Power. There’s a version of “I Got You (I Feel Good).” There’s a vocal feature for Michael McDonald. And it shouldn’t seem arbitrary that the album, which also has a cameo by Mr. Braun, is credited to “Dave Koz & Friends.” Mr. Koz’s cruise, affiliated with the Royal Caribbean line, goes by “Dave Koz & Friends at Sea.” This year’s edition will head to the Mediterranean in September, with Mr. McDonald, Ms. Abair and Mr. Whalum, among others.

Mr. Koz has a knack for cross-platform promotion. His previous studio album had a resort-reggae tune, “Getaway,” that could have passed for a Royal Caribbean jingle. (Sample lyric, sung by Jonathan Butler: “Leave the world, open up your mind/Sip a little wine, let your spirit shine/Gotta make a move and get away.”) Mr. Koz said the response to “Summer Horns,” the album and the tour, had exceeded expectations. “I think it’s a testament to the fact that the fans have not only not abandoned this kind of music, but their passion has even gotten stronger,” he said. “To the point where they’re willing to plunk down thousands of dollars to spend time with these artists for a week.”

The highly collaborative spirit of the current smooth jazz scene can be attributed at least partly to those weeks at sea. “We see each other in passing all the time on these festivals,” Mr. Brown said, “but on the cruise, we’re thrown in the pot together, and it’s beautiful.” The idea for “Human Nature,” an album of Michael Jackson covers, originated on a cruise, when he and Mr. Braun had some down time together. (At the time, BWB hadn’t made an album since its 2002 debut.)

Some smooth jazz artists have made a habit of collaboration for ages. Mr. James peppers his albums with R&B singers, which accounts for his crossover traction. “The Beat,” which entered the Jazz Album chart at No. 1 a few months ago, has kept selling copies, buoyed by the radio appeal of its title track, which features Mr. Braun.

And if you were a smooth jazz artist seeking encouragement, you could actually do worse than the current pop climate. The pianist Robert Glasper won this year’s Grammy for best R&B album with “Black Radio,” full of mid-tempo grooves that, with a different pedigree, could have registered as smooth jazz. If you’ve seen televised performances by the rapper Kendrick Lamar, you may have noticed the coolly insinuative style of his band, complete with a sweetly imploring saxophonist. And the runaway success of Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories” (Daft Life/Columbia), a dance album made with musicians in the studio, has heartened at least one corner of the smooth-iverse.

“That groove just sounds like the groove of smooth jazz,” Mr. Koz said of “Get Lucky,” that album’s lead single, which has sold more than a million copies. With a hope that may or may not have been forged by desperation, he added: “When I heard that record, I was like: ‘O.K., I don’t know how this happened. But it feels like the right time for this. It’s gaining momentum. We’re in the place that we should be.’ ”

A version of this article appears in print on July 7, 2013, on page AR16 of the New York edition with the headline: Smooth Sailing in a Sea of Evolution. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe